Alinsky.............................

I have known about Saul Alinsky since I was a kid growing up in the '60's.   His efforts at "community organizing" did not always meet with approval with my parents' generation, and I suppose, instinctively and without ever actually reading his works,  I picked up their bias.  Chicago based community organizers have been much in the news here of late.  At some point the question floated by, "what did Alinsky really say?"  Since he wrote a book, it seemed like an easy question to answer.  Still in the early pages, but this paragraph is interesting:

     Does this then mean that the organizer in a free society for a free society is rudderless?  No, I believe that he has a far better sense of direction and compass than the closed-society organizer with his rigid political ideology.  First, the free-society organizer is loose, resilient, fluid, and on the move in a society which is itself in a state of constant change.  To the extent that he is free from the shackles of dogma, he can respond to the realities of the widely different situations our society presents.  In the end he has one conviction - a belief that if people have the power to act, in the long run they will, most of the time, reach the right decisions.  The alternative to this would be rule by the elite - either a dictatorship or some form of a political aristocracy.  I am not concerned if this faith in people is regarded as a prime truth and therefore a contradiction of what I have already written, for life is a story of contradictions.  Believing in people, the radical has the job of organizing them so that they will have the power and opportunity to best meet each unforeseeable future crisis as the move ahead in their eternal search for those values of equality, justice, freedom, peace, a deep concern for the preciousness of human life, and all those rights and values propounded by Judaeo-Christianity and the democratic political tradition.  Democracy is not an end but the best means toward achieving these values.  This is my credo for which I live and, if need be, die.